"It's a boy, right?" asks Rhonda Laye, an investigator with the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services sent this frigid Sunday morning to check out a call to the agency's child abuse and neglect hot line.

The presence of drugs in the infant's blood, under Illinois law, automatically constitutes neglect, though it is not enough to warrant the state tearing a newborn baby from its mother. Or is it?

Would it be dangerous to leave the child in his mother's care? Would the infant be better off a ward of the state, tossed into an already clogged child-welfare pipeline with no guarantee of ever having a home?

These are the kinds of questions that Laye and the nearly 500 other investigators for the state's child-welfare agency face every day. Their decisions can mean the difference between life and death. They often do.

Investigators play a critical role in the state's effort to rescue and protect abused and neglected children. Their job leads them into crime-ridden neighborhoods, crack houses, high-rise public housing complexes and dark, abandoned buildings.

Investigators never know what they'll find in the world that exists on the other side of the door. They have come to expect the worst.

"If you ever talk to a policeman, they say the things that frighten them the most are domestics," said John Goad, who heads Cook County's team of 218 investigators. "But when they go, they go with partners and guns and radios.

"We go out by ourselves. No radios. No guns. No uniforms. No partners."

Investigators instead rely on their required minimum of two years' experience in the field and their college degree. Their job, at an average salary of about $35,000 a year, is to come up with perfect answers in an unpredictable, imperfect world.

Not surprisingly, investigators make mistakes. Poorly trained by the state's own assessment, they at times appear negligent and sometimes incompetent.

Last week, an emaciated 10-year-old girl, too weak to walk or speak, was removed from her West Side home by police. An investigator had seen the child just two days earlier but left her there. The investigator's failure to remove the child is under review.

Last month, 19 children were found in a roach-infested home on North Keystone Avenue in Chicago. Two DCFS investigators had been to the home weeks earlier. One who tried twice unsuccessfully to enter the apartment should be fired for not seeking police or court help, Gov. Jim Edgar said. The case is under review.

When investigators choose wrong, their cases lead nightly newscasts. And yet, when public furor has subsided, investigators still face the complex job of sifting through the gray.

It would be easier for investigators to take custody in all reported cases of abuse and neglect. The public rarely questions their actions when they pull children out of homes.

"The hardest thing for a worker is to not take custody," said Greg Young, Laye's supervisor. "You can get into a syndrome of `I'm protecting my butt.' "

Operating under a "when in doubt, pull them out" policy might pose the least risk to children. But it also would destroy families that might otherwise have been saved.

Also, with 37,000 children already in state custody, Laye and other investigators are hesitant to place other young lives in a system that can be as abusive and neglectful as the homes they left.

It's now about 9:15 a.m., hours shy of Laye's 24-hour deadline for starting her investigation, perhaps nine months too late for the ailing infant, and time for the state to begin picking up the pieces.

Despite nurses' coaxing, the mother will not name her son. Laye has named others. Marcus. Marcellus. Jordan. She'll name this one, too, if it comes to that.

In a world of increasing parental failure, it has come to the state providing the most basic of children's needs, a name.

That morning three of the six infants at the West Side hospital tested positive for cocaine, but Laye's assignment is the safety of the yet-to-be-named child.

She soon learns that the child had tested positive not just for one illegal drug but two. Heroin and cocaine.